Lucio De Re <lucio.d...@gmail.com> writes:

> But do we want a flock of 9front-wielding droids flooding the 9fans
> mailing list?

Good point.  Making something popular usually destroys it.  E-mail used
to be good, prior to The September That Never Ended.  Linux used to be
good, until about 2005.  The World Wide Web used to be good, too...
until it became popular.  Maybe we should keep Plan 9 a secret.  ;)

It would be nice if there was some way to translate between technology
intended for idiots and technology intended for experts.  Imagine if,
for example, every Android app automatically exported its functionality
over 9P.  The cell phone idiots would have all their flashy toasts and
swipes, but the apps would still be usable by command line nerds.

> PS: I concur with the late Dijkstra that the programming language(s)
> you learn shape(s) your ability to construct abstractions in your
> mind. We're kind of safe for as long as C remains the base language

That sounds like a variant of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (which applies
to natural languages) as applied to computer languages.

> I had an electrical engineering friend, back at university, who used
> array subscripts in C because he couldn't get his head around
> pointers. Like me, his migration was from Pascal to C.

Pascal has pointers, too, and they make alot more sense than pointers in
C.

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